The present invention relates to portals, and more particularly to techniques for sharing content between portals.
A portal provides a gateway through which users can access various information sources, services, and applications. A portal may provide access to several portal components including one or more portal pages, portal snippets, etc. A portal page may comprise one or more portal snippets that enable data to be retrieved and displayed on the portal page. Portal snippets are generally programs that retrieve data from an information resource and display it on a portal page. Examples of portal snippets include portlets, SAP's™ iViews, Plumtree's™ gadgets, Microsoft's™ web parts, etc. Portals generally allow a user to select and customize portal snippets that are included in the user's portal page or pages. In this manner, the user can customize the content that is retrieved and displayed on the user's portal page.
Due to their popularity and convenience, the number of portals in organizations has seen a rapid increase. An organization may have several portals within their organizational network such as corporate portals, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) portals, and other portals based upon the organization's needs. For example, each business unit within an organization may maintain its business content on a separate portal. These portals may use portal servers from different vendors such as SAP and non-SAP vendors such as Oracle, IBM, etc.
In an environment comprising multiple portals, it is desirable that the portals be able to share content with one another. This has given rise to a Federated Portal Network (FPN) that creates a single network out of separate portal installations and enables content sharing between the portals. FPN allows an organization with multiple portals, including portals from different vendors, to share content between the independent portals. In such an FPN, it is desirable that a user of one portal be able to access information, services, and applications distributed on other portals throughout the network that are remote from the portal used by the user.
Various solutions have been proposed to enable sharing of content between portals. However, conventional solutions are plagued with several shortcomings and disadvantages. For example, one solution allows remote content from a remote portal to be copied to a local portal used by an end user. However, once the content has been copied, it is disconnected from the remote portal source and as a result any changes to the content at the remote portal are not reflected on the local portal. The administrator on the local portal has to recopy content from the remote portal in order to be synchronized. Other solutions do not allow customization of content on the local portal. Many of these solutions also impose a burden on the maintenance of the FPN. For example, updates to a particular portal in an FPN necessitate upgrades to all the other portals in the FPN. This is inefficient and reduces the availability of portals. The Web Service for Remote Portlets (WSRP) is a standard defined by OASIS technical committees and allows portlets from different vendors to be shared. WSRP is however quite limited in its functionality.
In light of the above, improved techniques are desired for sharing content between portals.